Together we had sat in the old brown schoolhouse,—he in the big arm chair, and I—but no matter where _I_ sat when I told him of the little romping girl with yellow hair, who had there first learned to con the alphabet and to trace on the gaily colored maps the boundary lines of Georgia, little dreaming that her home would one day be there. Then when I showed him the bench where I had lain when the faintness came over me, he wound his arm closer around me,—though wherefore I do not know. Together too, we had gone over the old farmhouse, he lingering longest in the room where I was born, and when he thought I didn’t see him, gathering a withered leaf from the rose bush which grew beneath the window, and which I told him I had planted when a little girl. Every woman, young and old, in the neighborhood and in the village had seen him, either face to face or from behind the folds of a muslin curtain, some calling him “black and ugly,” while others pronounced him “splendid,” and all I believe united in saying that, “Rosa Lee had done wonders, considering she had no great amount of beauty to do it with!” Once, when a remark like this came to Richard’s ear he smiled quietly and said, “Rosa Lee is beautiful to me, for though her face may lack perfect regularity of features and brilliancy of complexion, she has beauty of a higher order, a beauty of the mind, which is seen in her laughing blue eyes and sunny smile.” Thus you see, my reader, that Richard thought I was handsome, while strange as it may seem there were others who said so too, and even I was sensible of a thrill of pride, such as I suppose conscious _beauties_ feel, when I stood up before the mirror and saw how well I looked in my bridal dress of satin and lace—_his_ gift, but not the same which he had purchased for me some months before. At first I had proposed wearing the one intended for Dr. Clayton’s bride, but Richard would not suffer it, so I gave it to Lizzy, who, as soon as _John Thompson_ was of age, which would be in January, would probably have need of it! This same John was to be our groomsman and much he amused Richard by telling him of the tall, hateful boy who had once been a terror to a little schoolma’am thirteen years of age, who now, with a heightened bloom upon her cheek and a strange light in her eye, stood waiting the summons to the parlor below. It came at last and as I laid my hand on Richard’s arm he imprinted a kiss upon my lips, “the last,” he said, “he should ever give to Rosa _Lee_.”